Global Inequality in Historical Perspective: An Introduction to Global History

2023/2024

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

3

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

Department of History

Course type:

Elective course

When:

1 year, 3 module

Course Syllabus

Abstract

This course gives an introduction to global history from the perspective of the economic anthropology of capitalism. Its aims are to explore key issues and approaches within this field of inquiry from the vantage point of a tension between political-economic (Marxist) and cultural (Weberian) perspectives in the historical and anthropological understanding of global inequalities. Topics of seminars include anthropological critique of the world systems theory, the war and free markets, subaltern modernity, Protestant and “ordinary” ethics, the political economy of state socialism, the social and economic condition of post-modernity, affective labor and “new” paternalism. While these themes make up a chronological vector from the early modern plantation slavery and industrialization to “late modernity,” they are not so much, or not just, to detail different historical periods as consider different research methodologies in their heuristic possibilities as well as limits.